They're wanting to keep away from the PT as much as possible, so theatrical reissues are not going to happen as the memory of Phantom Menace is still fresh.

In the future, when all the films come to whatever home video format prevails at the time, well maybe see them then in 3D then, but as we know Disney have stopped with the format in the US at least, and the new movies are not being shot in 3D to begin with, so the older films' redos are soon to become redundant artefacts, maybe only good for trotting out as special presentations like this.

Did the OT films every get conversions? I know some test footage was done on A New Hope before the PT films were even touched (big mistake starting with those and expecting everyone to go and see again when what we wanted was IV, V and VI), but I don't think the original films were ever converted.

Which again only makes the 3D conversion jobs on the prequels that much more of an anomaly. My guess is that they'll just been seen here and there, but unavailable to wider audiences.

They're wanting to keep away from the PT as much as possible, so theatrical reissues are not going to happen as the memory of Phantom Menace is still fresh.

In the future, when all the films come to whatever home video format prevails at the time, well maybe see them then in 3D then, but as we know Disney have stopped with the format in the US at least, and the new movies are not being shot in 3D to begin with, so the older films' redos are soon to become redundant artefacts, maybe only good for trotting out as special presentations like this.

Did the OT films every get conversions? I know some test footage was done on A New Hope before the PT films were even touched (big mistake starting with those and expecting everyone to go and see again when what we wanted was IV, V and VI), but I don't think the original films were ever converted.

Which again only makes the 3D conversion jobs on the prequels that much more of an anomaly. My guess is that they'll just been seen here and there, but unavailable to wider audiences.

To add my own two cents in here --

We know that Disney DID pay to convert a couple of the 2D classics from the 1990s to 3D format.
If I remember correctly, only 2-3 of these played theatrically in the US --- Lion King 3D, Beauty & the Beast 3D, something else?

Anyway, since then, it's been confirmed that they did AT LEAST a 3D conversion of The Little Mermaid (which was NOT released theatrically but it was still released to Blu ray 3D) and maybe even Aladdin --- I dunno about Aladdin for 100%, though. The 3-D conversion/theatrical program by Disney was abandoned when it became obvious to them that the film re-releases in 3-D were NOT making the box office they wanted to continue onward.

Same thing happened with Phantom Menace but that was probably NOT the best Star Wars to start a 3-D release program with, either... (Face it, the prequels do NOT have a good reputation with harder-core fans particularly the ones over 25.)

(Another thing to note --- Disney seems to have abandoned the traditional 7-year re-release cycle of selected films, too. Before the digital era, you could count on that occurring for a clutch of films. Granted, I think the re-release cycles could be sporadic and there were films that were NOT a regular part of the re-release strategy -- Fantastia, Song of the South, Snow White -- but a lot of the other stuff did get re-releases. Now, with the theaters have changed and more durable home video formats -- VHS was great for home video companies because the tapes DID wear out and get destroyed by heat(!) -- that re-release to theaters is pretty much over.)

It's just too darn expensive to go back and remaster everything in 3D... even home electronics has evolved so that 3-D is a niche. The cheapest sets I saw that supported 3D were the PlayStation 3 sets a few years ago but those were only on market for one season and Sony stopped making them because they lost a ton of money because that year (in the US in particular during Black Friday) when their sales were undercut by cheaper HDTV sets. I've heard the sets are decent BUT not great and the viewing area is less than 30" (I think).

The cheapest 3D set I ever saw was a 42" Vizio model at $500 and that was on-clearance in-store. In the last year or two (or three?), the only 3-D sets I've been seeing have been in-store are in the $2,000+ and the majority of those seem to be U-HDTV now.

I think they (Disney and other companies) will continue 3D releases but it'll only be on high-end new action/adventure releases-- films they know will pay for this on home video release (new Star Wars, superhero films, and whatever comes after The Hobbit in fantasy film). They never did much beyond action/adventure and general animation releases in 3-D anyway... I saw maybe one or two documentaries in-store (3-D version of Ghosts of the Abyss; I'm sure there were more 3-D documentary releases on Blu ray 3D) but the rest of it was and still is general (new release) Hollywood. There have been more 3-D releases outside of the US and I have been noticing more and more that they are tweaking releases regionally now... The home video companies are probably doing more non-American, exclusive releases now than at other point that I'm aware of... and this is mainly on older TV shows and movies --- I'm not even gonna bring in the Asian stuff; totally separate thing.

IF the companies in the US DO see enough interest in US releases of 'exclusive' overseas editions, they will eventually bring those to the US as well but it is NOT absolutely guaranteed that they will do that anymore. The good news, however, is that a lot of those releases ARE priced within reason and many of them ARE multi-region releases. The other good news is that even if they aren't, multi-region BD players are on-market just like there were multi-region DVD players. The much better news is that THIS time everybody accepted the same general video standard for HD so that the NTSC/PAL video incompatibility issue is a thing of the past...

"Waiter, more champagne...and plenty of ice!"
- Randall/Time Bandits, 14 April 1912, 20 to midnight -- local time

Still looks like Hamill/Skywalker is going to be the "Old Spock" climactic mentor passing the torch in this one, but boy, they're playing up the fans' OT-actor fantasies but good.
I'm feeling a little more confident about Harrison Ford's cameo after that last stinger, but will be the first to caution against fan-gushing that the entire movie is going to be about the callback characters.

droosan wrote:Anyone who might've had bad feelings over Disney causing Cartoon Network's Clone Wars to be prematurely cancelled .. just felt those feelings completely evaporate in the course of three minutes.

Took a season, but with the canonical Clone Wars crossovers, think they've found their groove--
Now it's starting to feel a little more like the Clone Wars II it was supposed to be, and not a CGI upgrade of the old "Droids" series.

Okay, even I have to admit that looks pretty cool, but then the original trilogy score will always win the old movie fans over.

In a funny way, and as expanded and "explored" as SW has become, I just can't shake the nagging at the back of my mind that says, having known and spoken with people that worked with Lucas back in the day, that SW was only ever intended to be a one-off movie, period. It's great that he was able to spin that off into sequels but even then the SW story is really just about Luke and Leia and Han and their fight against Vader.

Even as far back as the Ewoks and Droids series I never could get into them with anywhere near the excitement I felt for the films and the prequels, detested as they are, at least "worked" (even though they didn't) because we saw the origins of characters that we knew.

I liked the Tartakovsky take on Clone Wars as a limited series, but was left cold by the CG of the Clone Wars movie (what was the deal with that, is it a premiere for the series or was it the first couple of episodes?) and so never really got into The Clone Wars, even though I've been told the stories get better and overtake the lack of great visuals.

For me, though, there's just this lack of really good characters...sure, you can have "funny" characters, you can "imposing" ones and even great villains, but nothing has come along that has had the traditional writing of Luke, Leia and Han's dynamic, or even those of supports like Chewie and the droids, as far as I can tell...not with those fully developed depth of character and personality, anyway.

So then all these SW spin-offs feel, to me, to be "fake", even though we're told that they fill in the gaps between films...something that I feel is a bit of a cheat to flesh out backstory and make some extra money (which, yes, I obviously know is what it's all about anyway).

The bottom line is that SW was a one-off story about a farm boy who joined a resistance and brought down a corrupt government. Everything else away from that core does seem bolted on, with a lack of really tangible interconnecting tissue. Maybe if they were able to tie things more closely to that core (like when we saw the plans for the "Death Star" in Clones and everyone went "oooohh!") it might make for a more coherently expanded universe, but it does feel that SW has become something very different to what it started out and was originally intended to be.

Everyone else that has come after HAS come after it...it's all been bolted on, added to, revisioned, etc, without a solid plan that, say, like Marvel has had. In the words of Harrsion Ford's other Lucas character, they really are "making it up as they go", and a little more tie-ing together would be good.

I DO get that, because of where Rebels comes, it does do a little more of this, and I'm liking that they're going with the McQuarrie designs for a lot of elements (the lightsabres especially, even if they now don't fit in with the movie representations, making this talk of "canon" even more mixed up!), and maybe it's time for me to try and get over perceived notions and give it a go.

Of course, that's not too easy when you don't have DisneyXD, but hopefully the series will end up playing on a secondary channel here, like Clone Wars did. I can't see Disney issuing Blu-rays, though, as they don't for their TV stuff, bizarrely.

Ben wrote:The bottom line is that SW was a one-off story about a farm boy who joined a resistance and brought down a corrupt government. Everything else away from that core does seem bolted on, with a lack of really tangible interconnecting tissue. Maybe if they were able to tie things more closely to that core (like when we saw the plans for the "Death Star" in Clones and everyone went "oooohh!") it might make for a more coherently expanded universe, but it does feel that SW has become something very different to what it started out and was originally intended to be.

I was trying to explain recently just what was the hold the original SW had on the first audiences, and as official geezer who was THERE, worked it into the whole concept of how different movies were during the Watergate/Godfather 70's Malaise.
And I said that for anyone who was There, everything intangible about the movie that made you feel good was summed up in the characters coming off the big we-did-it moment straight to the medal scene at the end: The "sci-fairytale" quality, our heroes making good in front of the whole rebel squadron, the big important Williams blast of Luke's Theme, that knowing wink between Luke & Leia (and Han), and one of the first time we see all the characters together, clean. The power of Good winning out, when only a year earlier, an "optimistic" movie was Rocky getting beaten to a pulp.
I don't know whether it's the new kids or the over-nostalgic 40-somethings who say "Empire was so cool, because it was different and DARK, and they lose in that one!", but you're right, it took away from everything the original movie had--The dreaming overenergetic farm boy in the first movie became an impulsive jerk in the second movie, and a smug know-it-all in the third one.

As for the NT (New Trilogy?), I first took it on the same level as the Disney Muppet movies: The new owner wants to put on a show in his backyard with the old toys he bought, not noticing that they might be a little dusty and neglected since their previous owner who treated them with care.
And as one who was ready to write off JJ Abrams after Star Trek: I Saw Wrath of Khan, I wasn't looking forward to his overnostalgic attempt to resurrect every SW cult reference he remembered from his Super 8 childhood, but I think that actually works here: Like the '11 Winnie the Pooh movie, this feels like the new generation's activist attempt to bring an abused fallen franchise back to formula, just for the dedication of it--"Let's make our SW movie with real sets and locations this time, just like they used to!"

(Which is more than can be said for Tartakovsky's original CN "Samurai Anakin" cartoon, before they turned it into the CGI video game that kept its mind on the movies.)

It's too bad that anyone would write off the CGI Clone Wars after seeing the movie, which was basically a pilot for the show (definitely not episodes strung together). Things were pretty rough that first time out; but the following five seasons (actually 6, I guess) more than made up for those initial shortcomings.The unfortunate Thunderbirds look to the characters got a teeny bit better, but better yet were the visuals for planets, ships, and battles. And most importantly, the stories were generally very good-to-great. To me, the show felt much more like Star Wars than the prequels had. And thank goodness for the actor playing Anakin, who (along with the writers and excellent supervising director Dave Filoni & his crew) made the character work for the first time.

I haven't watched Rebels yet, and am hoping to catch up on BD. Funny Ben should say that Disney never puts its shows out on Blu-ray, since I just covered their Blu-ray for Clone Wars: The Lost Missions. Hopefully that sold well enough to convince them to do the same for Rebels.

In this prevew, I loved seeing old friends again, and also noted the McQuarrie designs, esp. Vader's mask. Nice touch. (No reason Darth couldn't have had more than one mask, after all.)

All the shows, prequels, and comics do feel bolted on, but that's okay to me. Even the new sequels won't feel truly canon to me, but as Alan Moore once said, all stories are imaginary tales anyway.

Ben wrote:I just can't shake the nagging at the back of my mind that says, having known and spoken with people that worked with Lucas back in the day, that SW was only ever intended to be a one-off movie, period.

This is true of the majority of movie franchises which come about as the result of an unexpected 'hit' film. Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix and many others (including the Indiana Jones films) were all initially made without any planning or forethought given to a 'universe' wider than was presented in the movie itself.

The exception tends to be in films adapted from an existing book/comic/TV property .. such as the Marvel movies, Harry Potter, James Bond, Star Trek, etc. But even those are not guaranteed a sequel, if the first film fails to 'hit' hard enough (like The Golden Compass or Lost in Space).

But Star Wars has always inspired more 'universe-building' than most .. even beforeThe Empire Strikes Back reached theaters, there were novels such as Splinter of the Mind's Eye (which hinted at Leia being 'force-sensitive' many years before Return of the Jedi), the first of Brian Daley's excellent trilogy of Han Solo novels, and -- of course -- the original run of Marvel Comics comic books and a newspaper comic strip by Al Williamson, all serving up 'new' stories featuring Luke and friends.

Speaking of the Marvel Comics Star Wars comic books -- their current comic book re-launch of Star Wars is friggin' EXCELLENT. It's set between the first film and ESB, and is presenting an adventure featuring Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and C-3PO that perfectly encapsulates the 'movie serial' format -- with each issue ending on a 'cliffhanger' which the reader is left to anguish over until the next month..!

Regarding Star Wars: Rebels .. OMG! Ahsoka lives!! And apparently, Captain Rex was definitely not 'down' with Order 66. The (inevitably tragic) showdown between Anakin and his former padawan -- so often 'pre-saged' in Clone Wars -- may. yet. happen!!

Yes, SW came at a time when Luke taking on the Empire was mirrored in a couple of journalists taking on the President and taking down a government with Watergate. I think that was easily a bit of a subconscious reason it was also successful, since there was that whole feeling that the little guy *could* take on the big guys and win for a change.

New Trilogy...I kinda like that, but technically it's the ST (Sequel Trilogy), no? But I am very much looking forward to it and do believe that it will feel like "real" SW.

Should clarify that I never actually saw the Clone Wars movie. I liked the limited series (again, the original score helped tie it in more) and probably would have gone along with a series in that style, but the trailers for the movie looked awful. By that point, the series started and was three or four seasons in before I started hearin that the writing and stories had gotten better (or really good in some cases) and it was really kind of too late to get into it. I maybe thought I would catch-up at some point, but it was never really on at the right time to start getting into it.

Just as an aside, the new Thunderbirds that premiered here last weekend...is *AWFUL*!

Disney is notorious for not putting their own channels shows out on anything other than DVD (see all the Disney Channel movies, Sofia, Mickey Mouse, etc) and it seems to be a fairly recent policy. Technically, the "sixth season" of Clone Wars wasn't a Disney show, and I think the BD of those episodes was basically a way for them to make them available somehow, keeping core fans happy and retaining their important good will while also making a bit of money. Perhaps the BD was a contractual thing, too (since Lucas was still involved at that point), or that the HD files were concurrently created with the production of the show and "may as well" be used? There's all kinds of reasons, but me thinks they basically felt obligated to complete fans' collections who had stuck with the show and praised and had collected it on BD (and who they wanted to make sure would come back for Rebels).

I must say I have a better feeling about the ST (Sequel Trilogy, or at least what we have seen so far from the new film) than how I felt about the PT, but I do just hope they get the character dynamics right. THAT's what makes any SW outing feel real, not just setting it in the same universe. My money is on Kasdan to make sure this is carried over and through all the spin-offs...the Force truly is strong in him...!

(Although I'm a bit disappointed that they've not stuck with Episode VII in the title. Okay, so they were revisionist retitling of the OT, but they do tie things together and would keep the continuing "saga" storyline clear as opposed to the spin-offs like Star Wars: Rogue One, which *do* work better without the "Episode..." titling).

Yeah, most franchises are born after the fact, of course, and they can continue and expand in many different ways (either by way of straight sequels, sequels with different casts, other media...). Maybe I should clarify that my "beef" with SW is that there's a LOT of baloney about Lucas having thought it all up before the first film was even made, which is just not true. SW was exactly what Droo says: a flash in the pan that led to more, never a ready made story all ready to go like a book (or even a planned series of three films, which Indiana Jones was, originally). The one good thing Lucas did have foresight to do was not to have Vader die at the end of A New Hope, which allowed him to come back for the follow-ups, but nowadays most franchises *are* designed with sequels in mind, which don't always happen when the first movie(s) don't hit as big as needed, such as with Narnia, which still has four books that will likely never happen as films in the current series.

So I'm not saying that anything not Star Wars '77 isnt SW canon, real SW or not valid. I love The Empire Strikes Back and much of Return Of The Jedi. They're all SW to me, as is the animated Boba Fett sequence in the Holiday Special and a lot of the tone of the PT (even if he got the feel wrong). But to say it was all planned is baloney...not only was it *not* planned, but the retroactive bolting on just hasn't been done very well, unlike most of the examples above, like Back To The Future to pick the one where it all just felt fluid and continued seamlessly.

Hopefully Rebels will be more "SW" feeling than most...I am getting that kind of feeling and, like I said, that trailer even impressed me.